FBA Ghost Listing

N

Nicholas Haider

started a topic
about 2 years ago

Hi Guy,

I'm having an issue with linnworks sending a "ghost listing" to Amazon for all my FBA Items. I will create an item and send all stock to FBA, no stock level will be updated for default warehouse and this will be kept as zero. Once the item sells out on FBA, the listing on Amazon should revert to FBM and as the stock is zero in default, this should show as zero. But No, the product page shows the item as available but my amazon inventory page says zero.

Linnworks calls this a ghost listing but i can understand where it gets the stock from if it was always zero in default. Has anyone else experienced this and is there a way round this as its been 6 months and linnworks cant seem to solve the issue, only telling me to contact amazon and they can remove the ghost listing but is'nt the stock level being supplied by linnworks and its their issue?

I hope some one can help

K

Keith Hillier

said
about 2 years ago

I think we are having the same issue, this is the question I posed to Amazon.ca...

Please describe your issue.

Why is it that SKU: 189028CAFBA with ASIN: B00C4PCCL4 show
as still available for purchase when the fulfilled by AMAZON and the
fulfilled by Merchant quantities are ZERO. Please refer to order:
701-0808113-3892230, this is a SKU that is fulfilled by Amazon yet the
order shows as fulfilled by merchant. This situation will cause us to
over sell and thus cancel orders unnecessarily. How can this be fixed?

There response:

I am Fabian from the Catalog & Feeds Team. I enjoyed
speaking with you today. I am glad I was able to help you verify why
you are getting Merchant Fulled orders on SKU: 189028CAFBA. I can
understand how this can be disruptive to your business.

As we
discussed on the phone, the issue is occurring due to the third party
software (Linnworks) submitting information that SKU: 189028CAFBA has 9 inventory in
stock. Please note that inventory updates on FBA listings using 3rd
party software will not display on the Manage Inventory Page due to
system not being able to recognize the adjustment from the 3rd party.

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Nicholas Haider

said
about 2 years ago

I think i solved it on our end over the weekend, even though its long winded and never needed to be done before on linnworks, it works.

Go into seller central an select the sku you are having the issue with, the sku should FBA, convert to FBA ( Even though the sku is already set as this) and convert only.

Once a sync with linnworks is done, the item should stop dragging "ghost" stock level from linnworks and the item will only show an FBA stock level.

Let me know how you get on

I

Ian Johnson

said
about 2 years ago

We had / are having the same problem.

Linnworks reply was:

"The main cause of a ghost listing being created on Amazon is when a stock level is submitted for an FBA listing. This creates a separate offer on the listing and marks it as FBM. It is, however, not managed neither by the seller, nor Amazon. We have identified an issue that when an FBA listing is first created and linked to a Linnworks stock item, it does not instantly get the 'Ignore Sync' status placed against it until the next time Linnworks orders an Open listings report and an FBA Inventory report from Amazon, which occurs once an hour, approximately. If a synchronization would have occurred within this hour before the Ignore Sync status was properly placed, it would send a stock level for an FBA listing and create a "ghost" Amazon offer.

These problems have now been resolved and the ignore sync status is now properly placed on all FBA listing. The only possibility that this could occur would be if you actually manually change an existing Amazon offer from FBM to FBA. If you follow this process, what you would also need to do is proceed to Settings - Channel Integration, open the Amazon mapping tool and press 'Re-request report', which should then download the listing and mark it as FBA within a matter of minutes."

However we still get totally random orders coming through for FBA items as FBM orders that have been listed for months.

N

Nicholas Haider

said
about 2 years ago

Are you selling both FMA and FBM on one ASIN?

We was having the same issue with orders coming through for items we did not have, we have managed to work round this my marking the item as "fullfilled by Amazon" in seller central, even though the item is FBA, this will stop your ASIN dragging over stock from linnworks that dose not exist.

This will only work if the ASIN is FBA only, to sell as FBM linnworks say to make another listing on the same asin

I

Ian Johnson

said
about 2 years ago

99% of our new listings are FBA only. On ASINs where we were FBM and then went to FBA we even created a new SKU (which we have been doing for 4 years since we started).

We went through all of our Amazon listings checking that we only had the FBA listing visible with no 'Ghost' listings. When we found one we changed to FBM then back to FBA to eliminate it. Even now we still get the odd one that rears its ugly head up. We have even had inventory 'forced' into an FBA location on a non FBA item by Linnworks which Linnworks could not understand why had happened but to be fair they quickly rectified that problem.

The problem I have with part of the Linnworks answer " If a synchronization would have occurred within this hour before the Ignore Sync status was properly placed, it would send a stock level for an FBA listing and create a "ghost" Amazon offer." is where does Linnworks get this stock level from ? After all in our case each FBA item has nil stock as it is a completely unrelated item to anything in our inventory and is not used for any other channel.